Who Helps Single Mothers in Nairobi? The Role of Kin Support

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12404
• Published date: 01 August 2017
• Date: 01 August 2017

S C McGill University

S M University of Maryland∗

C C McGill University∗∗

D B  C K African Population and Health Research Center∗∗∗

Who Helps Single Mothers in Nairobi? The Role

of Kin Support

Single mothers often turn to their extended kin

for nancial assistance and to help with child

care. Such support may be especially important

in areas of high poverty and poor environmental

conditions. Using novel kinship data, this article

assesses the extent of support given by more than

3,000 relatives to 462 single mothers living in a

slum area of Nairobi,Kenya. Contrary to stereo-

types about families in sub-Saharan Africa, the

active kin network of single mothers is rela-

tively small, and nearly a fth of mothers do not

receive any nancial or child-care assistance.

Different types of kin offer different kinds of sup-

port according to culturally proscribed roles.

However, support also depends heavily on kin’s

employment status, geographic proximity, and

Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University,3460

McTavishPeterson Hall, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0E6,

Canada (shelley.clark@mcgill.ca).

∗Departments of African American Studies and Sociology,

University of Maryland, 1119 TaliaferroHall, College Park,

MD 20742.

∗∗Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University, 3460

McTavishPeterson Hall, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0E6,

Canada.

∗∗∗African Population and Health Research Center, Manga

Close, Off Kirawa Road, P.O. Box 10787-00100, Nairobi,

Kenya.

Key Words: child care, family support, intergenerational

relationships, kinship.

age. These ndings offer a nuanced picture of

how single women living in slum areas draw

on their kin network to cope with their daily

demands as mothers.

An extensive anthropological, ethnographic, and

demographic literature documents the critical

role extended kin play in assisting mothers with

raising children in sub-Saharan Africa (Blanc &

Lloyd, 1994; Caldwell & Caldwell, 1987; Sear

& Mace, 2008; Sear, Steele, McGregor,& Mace,

2002; Verhoef, 2005). Grandmothers are often

singled out as being particularly instrumental in

protecting the well-being of their grandchildren

(Adams, Madhavan, & Simon, 2001; Cunning-

ham, Elo, Herbst, & Hosegood, 2010; Gibson &

Mace 2005; Karimli, Ssewamala, & Ismayilova,

2012; Madhavan, 2010; Parker & Short, 2009;

Sear et al., 2002; Strassmann & Garrard, 2011).

Other kin, including the child’s aunts, uncles,

and older siblings, are also known to regularly

lend a helping hand (Blanc & Lloyd, 1994; Sear

& Mace, 2008; Weinreb, 2002).

This support from kin may be particularly

important for single mothers, that is, unmar-

ried women with at least one dependent child.

Research from the United States and other

contexts has shown that single mothers relied

more heavily than married mothers on the

extended kin for nancial, emotional, and prac-

tical support in raising their children (Brewster

1186 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (August 2017): 1186–1204

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12404

Kin Support of Single Mothers in Nairobi 1187

& Padavic, 2002; Hogan, Hao, & Parish, 1990;

Jayakody, Chatters, & Taylor, 1993; Stack,

1974). Yet aside from a handful of recent stud-

ies on never-married mothers in South Africa

(Clark, Cotton, & Marteleto, 2015; Madhavan,

2010; Madhavan, Harrison, & Sennott, 2013;

Richter & Morrell, 2006), research on kin sup-

port for single mothers and their children in

sub-Saharan Africa is sparse. This dearth of

research in Africa is surprising given that sin-

gle motherhood is common in many countries

across the subcontinent as a result of high levels

of premarital birth, divorce, and widowhood.

More than half of the women in Tanzania(52%),

Kenya (60%), Malawi (61%), and Zimbabwe

(69%) have experienced at least one episode of

single motherhood before the age of 45 (Clark

& Hamplová, 2013).

The challenges facing single mothers living

in urban slum areas may be especially daunting.

High levels of unemployment and extreme

poverty place many mothers in precarious posi-

tions, struggling to pay for food, shelter, and

other basic necessities critical for the health and

well-being of their children. Children living in

such contexts require high levels of supervision

because the environment is fraught with extraor-

dinary dangers stemming from poor sanitation,

accidents, and violence (Ernst, Phillips, & Dun-

can, 2013). Children living in slums also suffer

from poor nutrition (Mutisya, Kandala, Ngware,

& Kabiru, 2015), low rates of immunization

(Mutua, Kimani-Murage, & Ettarh, 2011), and

high mortality (Kimani-Murage et al., 2014)

linked to these hazardous conditions. Unfortu-

nately, these urban informal settlement areas

may also restrict kin support because high rates

of mobility (Beguy, Bocquier, & Zulu 2010)

place mothers far from their extended kin net-

works, and crushing levels of poverty limit the

ability of kin to transfer nancial resources.

Thus, although poor urban single mothers may

be in great need of kin support, they may be the

least likely to receive it.

To better understand kinship support for

single mothers living in these challenging

environments, we developed and tested a new

survey instrument, which we call the Kin-

ship Support Tree, by interviewing 462 single

mothers living in a poor, informal settlement

of Nairobi, Kenya. The Kinship Support Tree

offers several advantages when compared with

typical household surveys, which often use data

from household rosters to approximate family

support (Gage, 1997; Nyambedha, Wandibba,

& Aagaard-Hansen, 2003; Omariba & Boyle,

2007; Parker & Short, 2009; Townsend, Madha-

van, Tollman,Garenne, & Kahn, 2002). Because

this instrument was specically designed to cap-

ture the full range of close kin (including the

child’s maternal and paternal grandparents,

aunts, uncles, and older siblings) living both

inside and outside the household, we neither

have to assume that all coresidential family

members provide support nor ignore support

received from nonresidential family members.

We use these innovative data to investigate

the following two main questions: How large

and strong are the kinship networks of single

mothers? What predicts the transfers of nancial

resources and child care from extended kin to

single mothers?

T F

Our analyses are designed to contribute to two

theoretical debates that have dened much of the

research on kin support to low-income families

in the United States and elsewhere. The rst

debate concerns the size and strength of kinship

support networks among disadvantaged groups,

including single-mother households. Early

ethnographic work described the resilience of

extended family systems among low-income,

urban Blacks in the United States (Stack, 1974),

and subsequent studies highlighted the essential

role of kin during times of economic hardship

and personal crisis (Uttal, 1999). Other stud-

ies, however, argued that lower income and

disadvantaged groups, such as single mothers,

received relatively little support from their

extended kin (Jayakody et al., 1993; McDon-

ald & Armstrong, 2001; Sarkisian & Gerstel,

2004) and that support from kin to single

African-American mothers had declined over

time (Brewster & Padavic, 2002). Although this

debate originated in research on low-income

or African American populations in the United

States, similar questions about the size and

strength of kin networks of single mothers in

other contexts, such as sub-Saharan Africa, have

not been explored.

In the second theoretical debate, researchers

tend to fall into one of the following two camps:

those who seek to understand transfers and sup-

port among kin as a function of structural fac-

tors and those who rely on cultural practices to

explain variation in kin support. The structural